One increasingly popular mining method, mountaintop removal mining, could be the most destructive yet. While traditional coal mining extracts coal from underground, the mountaintop removal method blasts away chunks of mountains to get at the coal beneath. It also controversially requires fewer workers than other methods of mining coal.

Flying above ancient Appalachian mountains that looked from high like snow-dusted moguls, it was jarring to see large sections that had been leveled off flat. Mining operations have radically disrupted massive areas, in an incredibly diverse ecosystem, and there is significant doubt about whether they will truly recover. For all we saw, it was only a small part of 800 miles of mountaintop removal mining in the region.